according to the aquatic ape theory that is now gaining acceptance, we did spend a goodly period of our evolution as coast bound amphibians after diverging from the chimpanzees.
And no, I'm not providing links and exhaustive proof, this is/., google for it.
also, birds frequently fly in planes, does that make them people?
I frequently re-read the dune books, all of them, including the ones his son did, and enjoy them all. The film did suck when it came to telling the original story, but it's not a bad film in its own right. I tend to expect films of books to be nothing like the book, after all how could they be? I can think of no way that anything but the smallest least interesting of books could be transfered to screen without suffering..
A good aproach is to use the one taken with Blade Runner. An Iconic film only slightly similer to the book (which I also really enjoy) that manages to stand on its own seperate from the original and avoids the usual 'crap film of book' comments. The cynic in me suggests thats because most people have never read the book, but I have, and I'm fine with the differences. Sometimes they just have to take the spirit of the story and run with it I guess.
Starship troopers is probably my favorite heinlein book, closely followed by Stranger In A Strange Land and Friday.
The all time worst conversion to a film for me has to be Running Man. The original Bachman story was entertaining and dark. The film was hidious, it makes me cringe just to think of it. That is an example of a film that will never stand on its own merits, because it has none, unless its merit is a pile of dog turds./rant
except that almost all the major characters in the film are dead in the book, and one who is alive in the book is dead in the film, and the officer who writes to him never enlists, and the bugs no longer have allies in the film....
I could go on. It's a good film, great in fact, very entertaining, but has almost nothing in common with the book. I like them both for different reasons, but the book is crying out for a closer adaption.
Dunes another one, David Lynches film was barely similer to Dune the book, and yet both are excellent entertainment.
"Public Access TV channels, live call-in shows, etc."
all carefully crafted to make you keep watching the adverts that are the real reason for the content in the first place.
The bbc, which has no adds, has web forums, and feedback sites on the interweb, but the actual broadcasts are not truly interactive.
I am not the best person to make broad statements about tv though, since I gave up on that crap years ago. I listen to the bcc radio services, but that's all.
television is not a forum. A forum is interactive, whereas television is a provider of information and adverts, with no immediate feedback. You are just a consumer of television.
They use the term 'interactive' to describe their news services, but thats just a menu system to move between streams. Can you add news? Nope, except by going postal and getting your very own slot.
on the spelling thing, don't know, I'm dyslexic. Personally I go with whichever version of a word appears, and leave others to work it out:-)
Windows NT is a single user operating system that allows multiple, but not simultanious logins, unix and linux are true multi-user systems.
Unix and linux are posix complient, which windows is only barely able to manage in any incarnation, and conform to open standards for operating system design, NT doesn't.
Unix and linux are more easily bent to the distributed processing model, by their design, the availability and low cost of software, and their multi-core support.
Linux has more efficient process management.
Windows NT is moderatelly competant in it's role, but not superior to unix or linux.
Windows NT does not implement pipes.
A goodly portion of the unix and linux code was written for the love of coding, producing undeniably superior results. This is, I will admit, a subjective view, but one that is shared by many.
hear that whooshing sound? Thats those numbers going over my head.
Good god, I'm just working on the idea of saving a few thousand pounds a year and enabling poorly funded researchers to get stuff done without the large budgets others have. This is primarily inspired by my struggles as an undergrad, and later, post grad, trying to do HPC problems on crappy desktop computers. SETI is an inspiration in this respect, but I prefer to originate my own distribution software.
I couldn't conceive of anything involving such large amounts of money, what with being an academic and all. I do absolutelly hate the awful waste of money that is having hundreds of computers on campus ticking over and doing nothing but burning energy.
Most of my work is with distributed software to perform HPC tasks, trying to move such serious work into the realm of the pc, so no, it isn't all for IBM mainframes.
Well ok a lot of it is, but I go with the idea that a better way is to utilise rooms full of unused undergrad lab machines at night and save money on the big iron. God know undergrads don't utilise them, unless you count flash games and msn messenger as correct utilisation (especially during workshops, dammit).
pardon me, but I'm 40, a parent, and frankly I know more about operating systems then my son does, and he's supposedly adept at computers.
Mind you, I work with real operating systems, not the godawful rubbish microsoft sells. XP, and I'm sure vista after it, are forever relegated to running games and trivial things that he needs (and endless damn fixing). Anything serious happens on our linux or unix boxes, that he has little or nothing to do with.
Microsoft are trying to bring linux into its own incarnation of the computing world, as every other major competitor to them in this field has faded into insignificance, or gone entirely. Basically they could beat linux if it was competing in the same way they work.
However it isn't, and I think microsoft just haven't grasped that. Open source (which seems to be a phrase under constant re-interpretation), has one interesting attribute, only the fittest survive, not the 'richest'. Money has never equalled success in the FOSS world. Although it can help a truly good product get better, it can't save a bad one. This is entirely different to the closed source world, where money can indeed prop up crap software (IE anyone?).
SUSE has never been the best distro, and its not very populer among the hobbyist userbase. All it has going for it is that microsoft and Novell have an established history of working together, something microsoft don't have with any other linux distributor.
Microsoft had no choice but to pick SUSE, so they have to get what they can from this deal by way of leverage on the linux install base.
They have already proved themselves capable of throwing billions into enterprises that make no money, so the idea that they could push 'microsoft aproved' linux at a loss to corporations and reap benefits by being perceived as an aproved software portal for the corporate world in this new era is entirely plausible. That would equal control, and that further means they can 'phase out' linux, because they control it, as it 'just isn't good enough'.
Alas, this is a house of cards, and it just won't work. The plain fact is that open source has never really been something one entity controls, so this deal with Novell will harm SUSE, but not gnu/linux as a whole. Microsofts real target is Red Hat, being as they are the major player in the corporate linux world, and Novell is as close as they can get to the Red Hat camp, close enough (they think) to harm its install base.
Yup, SUSE will be harmed, Red Hat may get pinched a bit, but FOSS is controlled by hundreds of thousands of developers, and will barely notice this event. Politics don't generally hurt hackers or prevent them from coding into the night, that's what mailing lists are for. You can't kill FOSS by finding bit of it and jumping up and down on it, and the open source world will always have a nasty habit of pulling a new unexpected innivation out that will deal a serious blow to any advance microsoft have made.
I won't be having anything to do with any novell products now, not that I did much already, I'd decided a long time back that SUSE didn't do linux the way I liked it.
The names will likely be randomly generated, and you'll have no choice, or a default provided and you'll have to check if yours available, which will probably take an absolute age.
Whatever, most people will probably take the default, botnet providers will figure out the random hostname generation algorithm, and anyone with a default generated name will be targetted.
That was a collosal waste of time, primarily because america essentially ignored it.
Basically, while the corporations are pulling the strings, america is screwed, and yet it still tries to get all uppity at other countries about pollution.
I don't upgrade my graphics haardware until something *realy* worth having it turns up, and that's rare.
It seems to me that the current corporate games industry has one simple model for game developement:
1: create or more often buy new game concept. 2: release version after version with tiny improvements and graphical tweaks to re-sell the same game again and again until people get sick of it. 3: goto 1
And they can spend years stuck on (2)
Whereas ID software, to name one good example, produce wonders each time they released a new game, making new hardware worthwhile (right up till doom 3 that is, what a pile). Alas, they are a rare exception.
I also still play TA, and will be upgrading hardware for supreme commander when it arrives, or a while after if it really needs it. Before that my last upgrade was over two years ago, and I'm still happy with what I have.
These new cards look nice, but if pretty was all I cared about then my pc costs would always be through the roof.
did that for real once, when I was fixing an internet raped wintel box. I deleted a load of crap that turned out to include some important photo's.
then I 'magically' managed to recover them a couple of days later when I was told they were gone by using a file undelete app, blamed the loss on the trojans that had over-run the pc in the first place, and extoled the virtues of backups.
I'm utterly paranoid about backups, I've got them going back years. This was ever since losing all my data, including some (imo) awesome doom 2 levels I'd taken ages to do for a competition.
'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'
were there not a couple of mystery cargo ships that departed shortly before the war started and vanished? There was something on the news at the time about them, but they dissapeared ina region where there was nil chance of finding them if they'd been skuttled.
After that, no more mention, but if wmd existed, my money would go on them being on those ships.
they have to object, since widespread understanding of their proprietary and horribly insecure system will result in huge loss of contracts, and possible faliure of their product altogether.
Their system depended for its security on forbidding anyone from getting close enough to see the flaws, because *everyone knows* this means hackers can never break it [koff]. This is a rather dumb aproach, but diabold wanted a voting machine manopoly and loads of profit, which openness would likely have prevented.
Name one current data storage medium capable of storing the amount of data required to really give an idea of what's currently going on that will last hundreds/thousands of years. Essentially our version of the ubiquitous stone carving.
I can't think of one. A dvd would be hard pressed to last fifty years given the average build quality, and hard drives just plain don't last that long.
Data will no doubt propagate through history, being changed, updated 'interpreted' and generally messed around with until it gives no more idea about us as petri's pottery shards do about the ancient world. Basically it'll always reflect the views of people regarding us according to their current culteral views, not our view of ourselves, and lets face it, we've done little to impress those who will follow us.
Nope, unless someone finds a permenant and hard wearing storage medium capable of storing large scale data we're pretty much screwed so far as getting our side of things heard in an unbiased fashion. The only thing certain to still hold info from our period in history far into the future is a small gold record attatched to a certain deep space probe.
It's been a while since I've bothered to use wmp to rip music, but I beleive it defaults to drm, and gives the easily selected option of 'unprotected' music, and warns you about choosing this option as if unprotected music is somehow a bad thing.
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steve ballmer squirting at me?
:-(
Thanks for that mental image
My optimism is at a peak, I just got sound working in gentoo linux....
ah, well, never try to do anything that might annoy something capable of killing a shark with one prod if its nose, that's the thing...
to be honest I can't even remember what the original question was....
:-)
Although we have established that you've got something against birds....
according to the aquatic ape theory that is now gaining acceptance, we did spend a goodly period of our evolution as coast bound amphibians after diverging from the chimpanzees.
/., google for it.
And no, I'm not providing links and exhaustive proof, this is
also, birds frequently fly in planes, does that make them people?
so because we can fly in aeroplanes, does that make us birds? Or because we can swim, does that make us fish too?
I frequently re-read the dune books, all of them, including the ones his son did, and enjoy them all. The film did suck when it came to telling the original story, but it's not a bad film in its own right.
/rant
I tend to expect films of books to be nothing like the book, after all how could they be? I can think of no way that anything but the smallest least interesting of books could be transfered to screen without suffering..
A good aproach is to use the one taken with Blade Runner. An Iconic film only slightly similer to the book (which I also really enjoy) that manages to stand on its own seperate from the original and avoids the usual 'crap film of book' comments. The cynic in me suggests thats because most people have never read the book, but I have, and I'm fine with the differences. Sometimes they just have to take the spirit of the story and run with it I guess.
Starship troopers is probably my favorite heinlein book, closely followed by Stranger In A Strange Land and Friday.
The all time worst conversion to a film for me has to be Running Man. The original Bachman story was entertaining and dark. The film was hidious, it makes me cringe just to think of it. That is an example of a film that will never stand on its own merits, because it has none, unless its merit is a pile of dog turds.
except that almost all the major characters in the film are dead in the book, and one who is alive in the book is dead in the film, and the officer who writes to him never enlists, and the bugs no longer have allies in the film....
I could go on. It's a good film, great in fact, very entertaining, but has almost nothing in common with the book. I like them both for different reasons, but the book is crying out for a closer adaption.
Dunes another one, David Lynches film was barely similer to Dune the book, and yet both are excellent entertainment.
I said don't watch television. I like dvd watching on my pc, sometimes.
"Public Access TV channels, live call-in shows, etc."
all carefully crafted to make you keep watching the adverts that are the real reason for the content in the first place.
The bbc, which has no adds, has web forums, and feedback sites on the interweb, but the actual broadcasts are not truly interactive.
I am not the best person to make broad statements about tv though, since I gave up on that crap years ago. I listen to the bcc radio services, but that's all.
check a dictionary? This is /. , checking facts is as bad as rtfa, have you no shame?
Still, I don't consider tv to be a forum, I consider it to be a waste of time.
television is not a forum. A forum is interactive, whereas television is a provider of information and adverts, with no immediate feedback. You are just a consumer of television.
They use the term 'interactive' to describe their news services, but thats just a menu system to move between streams. Can you add news? Nope, except by going postal and getting your very own slot.
on the spelling thing, don't know, I'm dyslexic. Personally I go with whichever version of a word appears, and leave others to work it out :-)
Windows NT is a single user operating system that allows multiple, but not simultanious logins, unix and linux are true multi-user systems.
Unix and linux are posix complient, which windows is only barely able to manage in any incarnation, and conform to open standards for operating system design, NT doesn't.
Unix and linux are more easily bent to the distributed processing model, by their design, the availability and low cost of software, and their multi-core support.
Linux has more efficient process management.
Windows NT is moderatelly competant in it's role, but not superior to unix or linux.
Windows NT does not implement pipes.
A goodly portion of the unix and linux code was written for the love of coding, producing undeniably superior results. This is, I will admit, a subjective view, but one that is shared by many.
hear that whooshing sound? Thats those numbers going over my head.
Good god, I'm just working on the idea of saving a few thousand pounds a year and enabling poorly funded researchers to get stuff done without the large budgets others have. This is primarily inspired by my struggles as an undergrad, and later, post grad, trying to do HPC problems on crappy desktop computers. SETI is an inspiration in this respect, but I prefer to originate my own distribution software.
I couldn't conceive of anything involving such large amounts of money, what with being an academic and all. I do absolutelly hate the awful waste of money that is having hundreds of computers on campus ticking over and doing nothing but burning energy.
Most of my work is with distributed software to perform HPC tasks, trying to move such serious work into the realm of the pc, so no, it isn't all for IBM mainframes.
Well ok a lot of it is, but I go with the idea that a better way is to utilise rooms full of unused undergrad lab machines at night and save money on the big iron. God know undergrads don't utilise them, unless you count flash games and msn messenger as correct utilisation (especially during workshops, dammit).
pardon me, but I'm 40, a parent, and frankly I know more about operating systems then my son does, and he's supposedly adept at computers.
Mind you, I work with real operating systems, not the godawful rubbish microsoft sells. XP, and I'm sure vista after it, are forever relegated to running games and trivial things that he needs (and endless damn fixing). Anything serious happens on our linux or unix boxes, that he has little or nothing to do with.
Microsoft are trying to bring linux into its own incarnation of the computing world, as every other major competitor to them in this field has faded into insignificance, or gone entirely. Basically they could beat linux if it was competing in the same way they work.
However it isn't, and I think microsoft just haven't grasped that. Open source (which seems to be a phrase under constant re-interpretation), has one interesting attribute, only the fittest survive, not the 'richest'. Money has never equalled success in the FOSS world. Although it can help a truly good product get better, it can't save a bad one. This is entirely different to the closed source world, where money can indeed prop up crap software (IE anyone?).
SUSE has never been the best distro, and its not very populer among the hobbyist userbase. All it has going for it is that microsoft and Novell have an established history of working together, something microsoft don't have with any other linux distributor.
Microsoft had no choice but to pick SUSE, so they have to get what they can from this deal by way of leverage on the linux install base.
They have already proved themselves capable of throwing billions into enterprises that make no money, so the idea that they could push 'microsoft aproved' linux at a loss to corporations and reap benefits by being perceived as an aproved software portal for the corporate world in this new era is entirely plausible.
That would equal control, and that further means they can 'phase out' linux, because they control it, as it 'just isn't good enough'.
Alas, this is a house of cards, and it just won't work. The plain fact is that open source has never really been something one entity controls, so this deal with Novell will harm SUSE, but not gnu/linux as a whole. Microsofts real target is Red Hat, being as they are the major player in the corporate linux world, and Novell is as close as they can get to the Red Hat camp, close enough (they think) to harm its install base.
Yup, SUSE will be harmed, Red Hat may get pinched a bit, but FOSS is controlled by hundreds of thousands of developers, and will barely notice this event. Politics don't generally hurt hackers or prevent them from coding into the night, that's what mailing lists are for. You can't kill FOSS by finding bit of it and jumping up and down on it, and the open source world will always have a nasty habit of pulling a new unexpected innivation out that will deal a serious blow to any advance microsoft have made.
I won't be having anything to do with any novell products now, not that I did much already, I'd decided a long time back that SUSE didn't do linux the way I liked it.
The names will likely be randomly generated, and you'll have no choice, or a default provided and you'll have to check if yours available, which will probably take an absolute age.
Whatever, most people will probably take the default, botnet providers will figure out the random hostname generation algorithm, and anyone with a default generated name will be targetted.
That was a collosal waste of time, primarily because america essentially ignored it.
Basically, while the corporations are pulling the strings, america is screwed, and yet it still tries to get all uppity at other countries about pollution.
I don't upgrade my graphics haardware until something *realy* worth having it turns up, and that's rare.
It seems to me that the current corporate games industry has one simple model for game developement:
1: create or more often buy new game concept.
2: release version after version with tiny improvements and graphical tweaks to re-sell the same game again and again until people get sick of it.
3: goto 1
And they can spend years stuck on (2)
Whereas ID software, to name one good example, produce wonders each time they released a new game, making new hardware worthwhile (right up till doom 3 that is, what a pile).
Alas, they are a rare exception.
I also still play TA, and will be upgrading hardware for supreme commander when it arrives, or a while after if it really needs it.
Before that my last upgrade was over two years ago, and I'm still happy with what I have.
These new cards look nice, but if pretty was all I cared about then my pc costs would always be through the roof.
did that for real once, when I was fixing an internet raped wintel box. I deleted a load of crap that turned out to include some important photo's.
then I 'magically' managed to recover them a couple of days later when I was told they were gone by using a file undelete app, blamed the loss on the trojans that had over-run the pc in the first place, and extoled the virtues of backups.
I'm utterly paranoid about backups, I've got them going back years. This was ever since losing all my data, including some (imo) awesome doom 2 levels I'd taken ages to do for a competition.
In reference to
'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'
were there not a couple of mystery cargo ships that departed shortly before the war started and vanished? There was something on the news at the time about them, but they dissapeared ina region where there was nil chance of finding them if they'd been skuttled.
After that, no more mention, but if wmd existed, my money would go on them being on those ships.
they have to object, since widespread understanding of their proprietary and horribly insecure system will result in huge loss of contracts, and possible faliure of their product altogether.
Their system depended for its security on forbidding anyone from getting close enough to see the flaws, because *everyone knows* this means hackers can never break it [koff]. This is a rather dumb aproach, but diabold wanted a voting machine manopoly and loads of profit, which openness would likely have prevented.
Name one current data storage medium capable of storing the amount of data required to really give an idea of what's currently going on that will last hundreds/thousands of years. Essentially our version of the ubiquitous stone carving.
I can't think of one. A dvd would be hard pressed to last fifty years given the average build quality, and hard drives just plain don't last that long.
Data will no doubt propagate through history, being changed, updated 'interpreted' and generally messed around with until it gives no more idea about us as petri's pottery shards do about the ancient world. Basically it'll always reflect the views of people regarding us according to their current culteral views, not our view of ourselves, and lets face it, we've done little to impress those who will follow us.
Nope, unless someone finds a permenant and hard wearing storage medium capable of storing large scale data we're pretty much screwed so far as getting our side of things heard in an unbiased fashion. The only thing certain to still hold info from our period in history far into the future is a small gold record attatched to a certain deep space probe.
It's been a while since I've bothered to use wmp to rip music, but I beleive it defaults to drm, and gives the easily selected option of 'unprotected' music, and warns you about choosing this option as if unprotected music is somehow a bad thing.